TV Ratings: ‘Sunday Night Football’ Opener on Course For Dip From Last Season

Will Thorne
·2 min read

Sunday night saw the gigantic new SoFi Stadium in Inglewood christened with a “Sunday Night Football” kick off between the Los Angeles Rams and the Dallas Cowboys.

While the game itself ended with a narrow victory for the Rams, the numbers for the game were hardly a victory for NBC. According to early Nielsen numbers, around 15 million viewers tuned in on Sunday night, and the game scored a 4.7 rating in the key adults 18-49 demographic.

That viewership figure represents roughly a 23% drop from the early numbers put up by last year’s “Sunday Night Football” opener between the New England Patriots and the Pittsburgh Steelers. Despite that game being a blow-out, it garnered 22.2 million viewers on NBC, which last night’s game is unlikely to match, even with the obviously important Los Angeles market comes into play later in the day. This post will be updated with the final “SNF” numbers once they become available.

A few days earlier, the NFL season as a whole kicked off with 19.3 million viewers for “Thursday Night Football” on NBC, down 13% from last season’s opener.

Elsewhere, the latest edition of “60 Minutes,” which featured an exclusive interview with Bob Woodward about his new Donald Trump book, delivered a 0.9 rating and a whopping 7.7 million viewers, according to early figures. Later on, “Big Brother” scored a 1.0 rating and 4.4 million viewers. That represents a decent 25% up tick from last Sunday, and a season high viewership tally to date. “Love Island” aired to back to back episodes which averaged a 0.5 rating and 1.8 million viewers.

Fox aired a preview special for the upcoming season of “The Masked Singer,” which delivered a 1.3 rating and around 4.7 million pairs of eyeballs. A preview of the network’s fall content followed with a 0.5 and 1.7 million viewers.

ABC aired reruns of its summer game show lineup, averaging a 0.4 across the night and tying with Univision, which aired two episodes of the Mexican version of “Masked Singer.”

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